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Your hard drive is a vulnerable thing, and so it’s something that you’ll need to protect at all costs. Think of your hard drive as the soul of your computer, without it your computer is nothing but an empty shell. Hard drive maintenance is vital. Lose your hard drive and you lose your personal files, records, photos, programs and a whole lot of other things.
In order to avoid this happening, you need to keep your hard drive well maintained, and to do that well, you need to know exactly what needs to be done.
The first thing you do before any hard drive maintenance check. You can do this by going to the Start menu, clicking on Programs, then Accessories, System Tools then Scandisk. This takes a while so you might want to do it at night or when you are sure nobody will be using the computer for a while.
Performing this action regularly will keep your program files organized, resulting in your computer running as efficiently as possible. Again, you can access this tool under the System Tools function, and ideally you should do this once a week, certainly at least once a month. More information on Defragging Your Hard Drive.
The Disk Cleanup tool will search your hard drive and then it will show you all of the temporary files, cached internet files and any other unnecessary files that you have on your drive. All of these files can be safely deleted, and it is advisable to do so.
Disk Cleanup can be accessed via the System Tools menu, and once again it should be performed on a weekly basis for best hard drive maintenance practices.
You can also get rid of lots of other garbage and clutter on your computer system, older temporary files and cache files etc. There are also other kinds of files that can be left dotted around all over your hard drive that you will want to get rid of. For instance, one of the biggest pieces of clutter you’ll find during hard drive maintenance is known as “mscreate.dir”, and then there are dozens of files that end with the “gid.” extension. Mscreate files are usually created as a program is being installed on your hard drive, and once the installation is done these files have served their purpose and are no longer needed. The .gid files are actually help files, which you really don’t need because they can be created at any time when you hit the “Help” button.
If you want to perform a manual clean up of your hard drive, you can select Start, then Find, then click on Files or Folders and look for these clutter files.
In order to locate and delete these folders, once again you need to select the Start menu, then click Find, Files or Folders and then enter *.tmp and this should find them all, allowing you to delete them.
If you are experiencing errors with Windows shut down, you can possibly fix these by searching for *.chk instead and deleting them as well.
You should try to make sure that your temporary folders directory is cleaned out once a week. While this folder does create various things that are needed by your system, deleting any of these will not cause a big problem as Windows can simply recreate anything it needs. The worst that will happen is that you might need to reboot your computer, but that is a small price to pay for a healthy hard drive.
It’s very important to clear out your temporary files during hard drive maintenance because if you never do this, the file will grow to a massive size and can slow down your computer significantly.
The only two files that you should leave well alone are the Windows System Folder, which should be obvious, and the Sysbackup folder. Both of these files are vital to keep Windows working properly.
Do you actually use these programs or are they just there? If you don’t, then it might be beneficial for you to delete the online services from both the desktop and your program files, and delete MSN from your desktop. Hard drive maintenance is often about deciding what programs you need and what you can live without. Deleting the unnecessary ones will save you a lot of space on your hard drive.
If you decide later on that you would like to use them, they are still on your Windows CD or you can easily download them again, so it’s no big deal. The point is, it’s senseless to keep them if they are never being used, and they can slow your system down a lot just by being there.
Another thing that you can wave goodbye to is the Internet Connection Wizard, once you are online. It really isn’t necessary to connect to the internet at all, and if you want to you can always use the internet Dial Up Connection Panel. Once again, if you need it later on it’s still there on your Windows disk, or you can receive it via Windows Updates too.
While you are probably going to want to use the full version of Microsoft Word on your computer, if you don’t use any of the other programs, for example Excel, Infopath and Powerpoint, then you really don’t need to install the whole Microsoft Office program. The full version takes up over 2.5 GB of your hard drive space, and will slow you down quite significantly.
Meanwhile, if people are constantly sending you files in different formats, it’s worthwhile to invest in a piece of software called the Jasc Quickview Plus Program. This program is great as it lets you open, read, write and even edit more than 200 different types of file, meaning that you won’t need to have dozens of different programs installed to read each of the different file types.
Just remember that the more programs and files that you have stored on your hard drive, the more prone it will be too errors and the less effective your hard drive maintenance will be.
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